Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Process Flows (BPF) have seen a major upgrade recently since the move from Dynamics CRM 2016 (version 8.1) to Dynamics 365 (version 8.2). The change is not only to the new Business Process Flow designer but it is extended to adding few more capabilities are particularly useful for many situations. For example, you can now add a workflow to a Business Process Flow and you have few more actions to steps.

The major enhancement that happened to Business Process Flows are around its data model. Business Process Flows are now an entity with each instance of each BPF created as a record (otherwise you couldn’t have had a BPF firing a workflow).

However, this comes with additional changes that you need to be aware of. For example, you now have a tab on every Dynamics Security Role which is called business process flow. This tab lists every BPF available in the Dynamics CRM instance so you can apply the various CRUD privileges to each BPF as part of each security role.

This also means that when you go to the Business Process Flow designer, you can no longer select specific security roles assigned to your BPF. This is now done inside your Security Role. It’s an important change that may confuse old timers who lived inside Dynamics CRM for so long!

Please also note that this means if you migrate a custom security role from Dynamics CRM 2016 (v 8.1) to a Dynamics 365 (v 8.2), your security role may not have the required privileges assigned.

So in summary, rather than assigning security roles to a Business Process Flow from within the Business Process Flow designer, you apply these inside each one of your security roles.